Inaugural IBM Blue Gene/P system to expand Argonne Leadership Computing
Facility
Will enhance researchers' ability to conduct breakthrough science and engineering
ARGONNE, Ill. (June 26, 2007) — Argonne National Laboratory, IBM and
the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science announced today that
IBM will soon ship its first external Blue Gene/P system to the Argonne
Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). This state-of-the-art system will
provide the computational science community with a leading computing capability
dedicated to advancing knowledge and solving the most challenging scientific
problems facing the nation, including predicting climate change or understanding
complex biological systems.
"The Blue Gene/P and Argonne's Leadership Computing Facility will help
accelerate innovation and revolutionize approaches to energy, environmental
sustainability and global security challenges," said Michael Strayer,
Associate Director of DOE's Office of Advanced
Scientific Computing Research.
The addition of the Blue Gene/P system will expand the ALCF's computing capability
and provide DOE's Leadership Computing Program with a 114-teraflops (114 trillion
floating-point operations per second) production system for open science and
engineering.
Blue Gene/P has a highly scalable torus network that can accommodate configurations
with a petaflops of peak performance, as well as a high-performance collective
network that minimizes the common bottleneck in simulations on large parallel
computers.
The Blue Gene/P systems use lower power per teraflop than systems built around
commodity microprocessors, resulting in greater energy efficiency and reduced
operating costs.
Blue Gene applications use common languages and standards-based MPI communications
tools, so a wide range of science and engineering applications are straightforward
to port to the Blue Gene environment. Blue Gene/P is compatible with the diverse
applications currently running on Blue Gene/L, including leading research in
chemistry, combustion, astrophysics, genetics, materials science and turbulence.
The ALCF currently has a single-rack IBM Blue Gene/L system—the BG/L—the first
in an IBM line that has the potential to reach petaflops capability by the
end of this decade. IBM's Blue Gene/P incorporates many improvements to the
highly successful Blue Gene/L design, which currently holds the LINPACK benchmark
record. Blue Gene/P moves to faster quad-core processors, while scaling up
network performance to maintain the outstanding balance of the Blue Gene series.
The ALCF plans to install a Blue Gene/P production system with 32,768 processors
in fall 2007, along with a test and development system with 4,096 processors.
The bulk of the production system will be used by researchers with projects
in DOE's Innovative
and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This program seeks computationally intensive research projects
and is open to industry and to all scientific researchers and research organizations.
These projects can make high-impact scientific advances through the use of
a large allocation of computer time, resources and data storage, enabling greater
insight into challenging problems.
Since April 2004, Argonne and IBM have jointly sponsored the international
Blue Gene
Consortium, a group of laboratory,
university and industrial researchers interested in the evaluation and use
of the IBM Blue Gene family of high-performance computers. The ALCF Blue Gene
system will allow for continued investigation of this unique technology.
About DOE
DOE's Office of Science
is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences
in the nation and helps ensure U.S. world leadership across a broad range of
scientific disciplines. The Office of Science supports a diverse portfolio
of research at more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide, manages
10 world-class national laboratories with unmatched capabilities for solving
complex interdisciplinary scientific problems, and builds and operates the
world's finest suite of scientific facilities and instruments used annually
by more than 19,000 researchers to extend the frontiers of all areas of science.
To advance scientific discovery, DOE supports a portfolio of national high-performance
computing facilities housing some of the most advanced supercomputers.
About Argonne
Argonne National Laboratory brings
the world's brightest scientists and engineers together to find exciting and
creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology.
The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic
and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne
researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities,
and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific
problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for
a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed
by UChicago
Argonne, LLC for
the U.S.
Department of Energy's Office
of Science.
About ALCF
The Leadership Computing Facility Division operates the Argonne
Leadership Computing Facility — the ALCF — as part of DOE's effort to
provide leadership-class computing resources to the scientific community.
The mission of the ALCF, established in 2006, is to provide the computational
science community with a leading computing capability dedicated to breakthrough
science and engineering. The ALCF provides resources that make computationally
intensive projects of the largest scales possible. ALCF staff members operate
this facility for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and also
provide in-depth expertise and assistance in using ALCF systems and optimizing
their applications. DOE selects major ALCF projects through the Innovative
and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program.
This program seeks computationally intensive research projects of large scale
that can make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a large
allocation of computer time, resources, and data storage.
About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80
years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources
from across IBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services,
solutions, and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to
take full advantage of the new era of e-business. For more information
about IBM, visit www.ibm.com.
For
more information, please contact Eleanor Taylor (630/252-5565 or etaylor@anl.gov)
at Argonne or Michael Corrado (914/766-4635 or mcorrado@us.ibm.com)
at IBM.
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